Fintech Companies Ride The Augmented Reality Wave.

In this publication, we will define augmented reality, and explain its difference with virtual and mixed reality. We will present a case study where Belatrix Software implemented augmented reality to enhance the customer experience of a fintech company.

Introduction: Fintech firms differentiate via customer engagement

The future is bright for fintech companies. Recent research shows global investment in fintech is set to double from $10 billion in 2014 to $19.7 billion in 2015. By 2020, the total is projected to be $46.1 billion. One of the reasons for this significant growth is because customers are demanding new levels of technology (particularly mobile) capabilities from financial service providers.

One of the key ways fintech companies differentiate from their traditional financial services competition is by focusing on enhancing customer engagement and user experience (UX). To achieve this pioneering fintech companies are looking to incorporate augmented reality (AR).<d/p>

While augmented reality has been around for a number of years, it is only gradually being adopted. However analysts forecast the market for augmented/virtual reality could be worth $150 billion by 2020, with augmented reality taking the lion’s share with around $120 billion and virtual reality at $30 billion. While today there are already examples of augmented reality apps, tools and innovations, the challenge has been creating products which customers will instinctively use. In other words, doing cool things with technology gets attention, but creating something useful from augmented reality is another issue.

In this publication, we will define augmented reality, and explain its difference with virtual and mixed reality. We will present a case study where Belatrix Software implemented augmented reality to enhance the customer experience of a fintech company.

Augmented Reality in a nutshell

The term augmented reality (AR) is often confused with virtual reality (VR) or mixed reality (MR). While this article is focused on augmented reality, it is important to first understand the difference between the terms.

Augmented reality involves a real-time view of the physical world around us, which is then improved or enhanced by digital information. Virtual reality meanwhile involves creating a simulated world, rather than our actual world around us. Mixed reality combines aspects from augmented reality and virtual reality, to let the user see the real world while also seeing virtual objects in a single display. We can illustrate the distinction with some examples.

Firstly, we see an example of augmented reality (and also wearable technology) in the Iron Man movie. Tony Stark uses a helmet with a heads-up display that has the capability to add information about locked-on objects, in this case the Santa Monica Ferris wheel.

Secondly, an example of virtual reality can be seen with the aerospace company, Boeing, which uses a sophisticated virtual reality system called CRVS (Constant Resolution Visual System). It simulates a flying experience, while the pilot stays on the ground. As you can see in the picture, the environment is fully created by the system. This is part of a new concept called immersive education.

Google aims to encourage interest and development in virtual reality, as well as virtual reality applications. They have recently launched a low-cost system called Google Cardboard, a virtual reality platform for use with a fold-out cardboard mount for a mobile phone.

They have also implemented an immersive education program for providing virtual reality experiences to school classrooms through Google Cardboard viewers, allowing educators to take their students on virtual field trips. Each classroom kit would include 30 synchronized Cardboard viewers and smartphones, along with a tablet for the teacher to act as tour guide.

Thirdly, Mixed Reality can be illustrated with Microsoft’s new holographic headset. It maps your room and mixes holograms with the environment around you. It can be used to play Minecraft as you can see in the picture.

Main components of an Augmented Reality system

Case Study: Enhancing customer experience with augmented reality

How can we differentiate our mobile app and create a customer experience that our clients will love? That was the question posed to Belatrix by a Latin American pioneer in mobile banking and payment solutions. The company offers customized solutions to top financial groups and corporations in the region that enable over 5 million monthly active users to execute over 30 million transactions.

The company needed assistance in improving the architecture of their mobile payment platform, with PCI-compliant services. They also needed to implement their banking and payments solutions in several end customers, such as a credit card company and a local bank.

To answer the question posed by the company, we examined how augmented reality could enhance their mobile user experience. Belatrix implemented an augmented reality map to help users easily locate nearby ATMs, simply by using the camera on their phone. The app combines a live view of a street with location-based services. The nearest ATM is indicated onscreen based on the direction the phone is pointed.

To achieve all this in real-time, the app calls a service that provides the degrees of longitude and latitude of ATM’s in a half-mile radio. Using the correspondent library, the phone camera view was aggregated with icons and information about the ATM.

The Belatrix team was made up of 21 engineers, including Scrum Masters, development and quality assurance (QA) engineers. One team was focused on the backend development, using Java stack. The other team developed both iOS and Android native apps.

The following list details the technologies used in the project for software development and QA:

Conclusion: Augmented reality can help you differentiate your customer experience

We have reviewed the definition of augmented reality, and the difference with other terms like virtual reality and mixed reality. Augmented reality is not science-fiction anymore. To demonstrate this, we have shown how augmented reality can be implemented to enhance the customer experience of a financial mobile app. This will help the fintech company differentiate its services from its competitors.

With investments from industry giants like Apple, Google, Sony and Facebook in the field, we should expect to see increasing use cases for augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality in our everyday lives.

In the future, we envision that the main opportunity for augmented reality in fintech will be with data visualization. While much of finance and trading is controlled by algorithms and automatic processes, as more data is consumed by computers, it has made it harder for humans to analyze what is going on. As a result, data visualization products aided by augmented reality will become increasingly popular.